OOo 2.0.3 Released

OpenOffice.org has released third update of their OOo 2.0.x version. This update is released three months after their last update of 2.0.2. You can find the release note of the OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 for more information about what has been changed since 2.0.2 release. Here are the press release from Louis Suarez-Potts, OpenOffice.org Community Manager :

All,

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since
the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new
features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the
OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as
the world's leading open-source office productivity suite.

The security patches fix vulnerabilities that have been found in
internal security audits. Although there are currently no known
exploits, we urge all users of 2.x to upgrade to the new version or
install their vendor's patches accordingly. Patches for users of
OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 will be available shortly. For details of the
security issues fixed, see Security Bulletin 2006-06-29:

* http://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin-20060629.html>

Key features of the new release:

* performance improvements: for example, a 23 percent improvement in
certain Calc benchmarks
* further improvements to file format compatibility with Microsoft
Office files
* new email integration features for users wanting to send emails in
Microsoft file formats
* more control over how exported PDF documents will display when
opened in a PDF reader
* support for more languages and improvements in hyphenation and
thesaurus
* support for Intel architecture for Mac OS X plus improved Mac OS X
System integration
* built-in check for updated versions

OpenOffice.org is also the first office suite to support the ISO
approved OpenDocument Format as its native file format. The standard
- ISO/IEC 26300 - defines how office documents (spreadsheets,
wordprocessor documents, etc.) must be stored so that they can be
exchanged with any compliant software package. Its adoption
represents an historic "Freedom of Information" breakthrough for the
IT industry.

Download OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 now from our volunteer servers. Not all
languages may be ready, so check with your favourite Native Language
project (http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html).

* http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.3/

If you find the pages too busy, try using our legal peer-to-peer
(P2P) system.

* http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/

If you do not have a suitable internet connection, consider buying
a CD-ROM from an OpenOffice.org Community Distributor.

* http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/

--The OpenOffice.org Team



About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer
and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the
leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office
Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as
legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing
platforms in over 70 languages. OpenOffice.org is provided under the
GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of
charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a
number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor
and primary contributor.

Links

The OpenOffice.org Community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org

To learn more of the project, see http://about.openoffice.org/

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 may be downloaded free of charge from http://download.openoffice.org

Further information about the suite may be found at http://www.openoffice.org/product

Press Contacts

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org +44 (0)7 810 278 540

Cristian Driga (UTC +0200)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
cdriga@openoffice.org +40 7887 000 60

Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -04h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org +1 (416) 625 3843

Worldwide Marketing Contacts

http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html

For Indonesian users, please have a look at Kambing which already download the latest version of OOo 2.0.3. Other mirror will soon follow up :D

If you need information about how to install OOo, please refer to OOo 2.0 Setup Guide which available from Documentation Project. Indonesian version are also available.

Mandriva Held A Music Contest

Here are the press release taken from the Mandriva News Letter:

Mandriva launches an international contest specifically designed for musicians.

In prevision of the release of its new distribution, Mandriva Linux
2007, in October, Mandriva initiates a contest whose objective is to
bring the Linux community together with the elaboration of the session
startup and logoff music of all the distributions of the Mandriva
Linux 2007 range.

The contestants will have to register on the homepage of the contest:
(http://corp.mandriva.com/webteam/soundsubmit/) and submit their
creations between June 21st and August 20th at midnight.

Every contestant will have to submit two sounds files: one for startup
and one for loging off the computer. Each one of them will have to
last 5 seconds maximum.

They will have to be encoded in 32 bits minimum (superior encoding
accepted). The creations will be submitted under one of those two sound formats:

.wav
.aif

Last but not least, in case of victory and in order to respect the
Open Source values Mandriva promote, the contestants will have to
agree for their original creation to be registered under one of those
two licenses:

CC.BY. SA (Creative commons www.creativecommons.org)

LAL (Art Libre, www.artlibre.org)

The winner may choose one of the following two prizes:
* A life membership of the Mandriva Club, Silver level;
* A copy of Mandriva Linux PowerPack+ 2007, a GlobeTrotter 2.0, and
an Archos Pocket Media Assistant PMA400.

Inscriptions and full terms of participation on the website:
http://corp.mandriva.com/webteam/soundsubmit/

If don't feel such a musician, maybe you could participate to our
graphic contest :
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/Main/ContestSummer2006

The Mandriva Team

Who wants to participate ??

CodePlex VS SourceForge

On June 27 (28 in Indonesian), Microsoft launches CodePlex, an online collaborative software development portal which is almost like the same as Sourceforge which exist before CodePlex. This portal was built on C# using .NET 2.0 technology with Team Foundation Server on the back end. Up to now (as i'm writing this post), there has been 48 projects that has registered to this services and it will keep growing as they become more mature each day. Some OpenSource projects has already registered also, for example "Atlas" Control Toolkit and IronPython 1.01 Beta 1.

CodePlex provides source control, issue tracking, discussion forums and RSS feeds in and out of each project so that members can stay up to date on the development issues most important to them. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server enables developers to collaboratively develop, share, discuss and consume source code and build software. Most of this features has been implemented in SourceForge and they still had a lot of features beyond CodePlex. I don't know whether CVS or SubVersion will be implemented in CodePlex in the future as it has different method with Visual Source Safe which is the main code revision tool in Microsoft's products.

One factor that become the key point to win over SF is by giving a stable and robust services, as SF often closing down their services due to an outage which always be posted in their site status page. One of the service that often being temporarily closed is the CVS Service. Once, they had a major crash on their storage and finally they did a major infrastructure upgrade that makes developers have to reconfigure their CVS account again and re-test the repository again. Let's hope CodePlex don't have this problem also in the future (i don't think it will be happening now, as the project is still relatively small, except when the server is being DDOS'ed or hacked)

Tokyo Drift OST

Finally, after downloading for few hours using Bittorrent, finally i can listen to OST (Original Sound Track) of The Fast and The Furious : Tokyo Drift. It has a total of 12 songs. It all happened when at the mourning, my friend visited mp3.com and listen to the OST by streaming. I was curious if the OST is available in the Internet. So, i searched the album via Google, my favourite search engine and i found a link which provide a torrent file for the OST. I started to download it and now, i'm already listening on it. Nice songs (it will be great if the car is also available, but it's quite impossible for me)

The Fast and The Furious : Tokyo Drift

Yesterday i saw a movie The Fast and The Furious : Tokyo Drift and it was great movie. There was so many drift technique that was shown there by DK (Drift King, not Donkey Kong), Han (sadly, he was dead after being chassed by DK and his car blown up after having an accident. I think he was the coolest person in this movie), and Sean Boswell (Sorry Morimoto, you are not in the list). They all use Asian's car type, such as Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Toyota. I wonder how much does this movie cost? since they have to prepare so many nice and heavily modified cars for this.

When the film ended, i saw a lot of stuntman list on the screen (it will likely use so many stuntman on that kind of movie, since it was dangerous. It also displays a warning messages noting that it should not be tried since the movie was made by professional stuntman and well equipped).

What a nice movie and it's a recommended movie to be watched (but not to be tried at streets). Next movie : Superman Returns which should be available next week (i hope).

Champion of the Week

We shold be proud of one of Indonesian developers who now works for Nokia Canada, Antony Pranata. He has just won a champion of the week and Forum Nokia Champion. He was first mobile developers who port an application to S60 3rd Edition, the latest Nokia’s smart phones platform. You can see many articles and troubleshooting about mobiles, mostly for Nokia in his mobile blog. He also wrote some article in his other blog (life and opinion) during his life in many countries (Singapore, Canada, Germany, and Indonesia of course)

He had his wedding ceremonies last month in Jogja. Congratulations and start a new wonderfull life with Emi :D

CD Delivery Is No Longer Costly?

For some time in the past, people have complained that they have paid so much for Ubuntu CDs which can be requested freely by ordering at Ubuntu Linux (you can see some of them in Priyadi's blog). Some people have been asked to pay two hundred thousands rupiahs (or perhaps more) for those CDs, so most people will just download or copy from their friends rather than having to pay that sum of money just for the delivery services. When i ordered Ubuntu 4.10, i only had to pay seven thousands rupiahs and for the new 6.06 version, i only have to pay three thousands rupiahs, even though i ordered a lot of them (8 Ubuntu Linux, 10 Kubuntu Linux, 5 Edubuntu, and 2 Ubuntu Linux for Mac platform). Here are the screenshots of the of the bill i should paid for the services (Thanks to my colleague, Adi Saputra which i borrowed his mobile phone to took this screenshots. For Nana, here are the screenshots you asked hehe, so i'm not in the 68% list hehehe)



I hope everybody will get the same treatment as i get for this services. So far, only me and Nana who post about this, so let's wait for several days as most of Indonesian people will rather order it online instead of downloading because of the lack of bandwidth in some places.

(Edu/K/U)buntu CD Arrived

Just now, my order of (Edu/K/U)buntu CDs arrived at my office. It was sent from Netherlands via TPG Post. I ordered them last month (at the end of May i think) and less than one month, the CD has been delivered safely. Thanks to Cannonical who supports Ubuntu developments. This shipment is a lot faster than my previous orders (back when Ubuntu first releases 4.10 version. My order of 5.10 wasn't delivered up to now, but i have the latest 6.06 LTS for now).

Ubuntu Linux has become one of the trends nowadays and it has won a PCWorld 2006 awards. Every release will bring a lot of attention for many peoples around the world. I personally use Ubuntu for rescue CD when needed and not in my daily activities, as i'm fairly happy with Slackware.

Microsoft VS FLOSS

Steven Hilton has updated his software wars maps up to 2006 and we can now see that the Microsoft have a rough challenge this year just as it is in last year. Slackware isn't listed there, even though i personally hoped that it will be listed there, since it's one of the stable GNU/Linux distro available up to now. Google has been started to give Microsoft some headache in the last two years and it will be more than this, since they will develop a lot of cool applications for Windows and GNU/Linux platform.

Laptop Security

Based on CSI/FBI Computer Crime Survey on 2005, we can conclude that stolen laptops case were increasing since laptops is easier to be stollen since it has smaller dimension and can be carried with a bag. Other thing that became one of the factor is that laptops usage is now common in most countries, including Indonesia. I have seen many people are working with their laptops, even they are in a mall. Companies have started to use laptops instead of desktop, since it can be used when you are travelling outside, so you can still work outside the office.

Since laptops have started to replace desktops, it's common to put all your data in your laptops. The problem is when your laptop get stollen. Other people will have access on your laptop, including your personal data or even worse, your company's data. One simple way to prevent access to it is by giving some password on different levels. You can start by giving password in BIOS or in the operating system itself (by making local accounts with strong passwords). For more paranoid people, you can start using third party software which encrypt some folders on your system (in Windows platform. I don't know in GNU/Linux), such as Folder Guard or Folder Lock. This way, the thief will have to pass several test first before they can view the data itself (even though it can be passed easily by using some Linux LiveCD distro, such as Knoppix or Ubuntu by mounting them in differnt laptop or desktop).

If you are trully paranoid, you can try using LoJack from Absolute. It can track your laptops and if your laptop isn't recovered within 30 days of you reporting it stolen, they will refund your purchase of Computrace LoJack for Laptops. You can also see their nice presentations. Unfortunately, this service requires that the laptop gets connected to the Internet before the data is being sent to the central data.

One conclusion about security is that there will never be 100% security. We can only try our best to prevent it.

Opera 9.0

Opera 9.0 has been released after their second beta release and a long waited browser is now available. Major features implemented in this release are Content blocking, BitTorrent support, Widgets, Search engine editor, Site preferences, New installer. One package -- 30 languages, Integrated source viewer, and opera:config for advanced settings configuration. For full and complete changelogs, please see for each platform (Windows and GNU/Linux). Since Opera 9.0 has passed Acid Test2 and updated their support for CSS (version 2 and 3 partially), SVG, and other W3C Specification, most developers will be likely use this browser as one of the browser to be used in their testing in order to gain maximum compatibility with other browsers also. Me myself have started to use this browser when testing a web page when it's still in version 7.50 up to now.

Opera now supports opera:config which is like the same as about:config in Mozilla Firefox. It's used to set some settings in Opera. It has nice interface. You can see Windows's version below :

Reviving From Deaths

Finally a new version of MPlayer is released after a year without any release. This release gives so many changes compared to their latest release (1.0pre7try2). This release is only one month after their main server was dead last month and few days ago, they have started to turn their SVN Access online again. In this long development time, they did something and the result has been publicized by the release of 1.0pre8. It contains a lot of changes as you can see here:

Security:
* support for compilation with non-executable stack
* fix the major issues caught by Coverity's static analysis runs

Documentation:
* environment variables documentation started
* interactive control fully documented
* improved encoding guide
* new technical encoding guide in DOCS/tech/encoding-guide.txt which is to be merged into the existing guide
* encoding tips for x264 and XviD
* how to set up MEncoder for x264 support
* new advanced audio usage guide with surround sound instructions
* Hungarian XML documentation translation finished
* Czech documentation translation finished
* French MPlayer documentation synced
* German man page synced
* Hungarian man page synced
* Italian man page synced
* Chinese console messages synced
* misc improvements all over the place
* AIX port documentation added
* all XviD options documented
* CONFIGURATION FILES section added to the man page
* Doxygen comments added to configuration parser and OpenGL video out driver

Drivers:
* JACK audio output rewritten without bio2jack
* OpenAL audio output - unfinished, can only do mono output
* OpenGL video output modules support -geometry and -wid options
* for -vo gl manyfmts is now default (since it is a lot faster), use -vo gl:nomanyfmts if it does not work for you
* streaming textures for -vo gl, much faster if supported (use -dr)
* hardware YUV to RGB conversion for -vo gl and -vo gl2, see yuv suboption
* support for custom fragment programs for -vo gl (see TOOLS/*.fp)
* support for bicubic hardware scaling in -vo gl, see lscale suboption
* use libvbe from vesautils as VESA video driver
* several fixes for the GGI video output driver
* fall back on next video output driver if vo_3dfx failed to initialize
* improved XvMC library detection (disabled by default)
* DPI (Print-Resolution) and Pixel-Aspect support in vo_jpeg
* ALSA audio output: several small fixes and improvements
* removed experimental mmap suboption from the ALSA driver
* YUY2 and back end scaling for S3 Virge chips on fbdev (-vo s3fb)

Decoders:
* Indeo2 (RT21) support via lavc
* Fraps video decoder via binary DLL
* support for 8-bit PNGs with palette
* support for dmb1 MJPEG files with ffmjpeg
* support for musepack audio (WARNING: when seeking you might get ear- and speaker-breaking noises). If you hear clipping, use -af volume.
* experimental speex support via libspeex
* On2 VP7 video decoder via binary DLL
* Duck/On2 TrueMotion2 (TM20) support via lavc
* support FLX and DTA extensions for flic files
* QDM2 audio decoding via lavc
* cook audio decoding via lavc
* TrueSpeech audio decoding via lavc
* CamStudio video decoder via lavc
* hwmpa pass-through MPEG audio codec
* tremor updated to libogg 1.1.2
* PNG decoding via libavcodec
* removed native RealAudio codecs (ported to lavc)
* Zip Motion-Block Video (ZMBV) decoder via lavc and binary DLL
* support for QuickTime in24/in32/fl32 PCM audio
* internal libfaad updated to CVS 20040915+MPlayer patches
* RTJpeg decoder from lavc is preferred
* bug fix for lavc WMA v2 decoder, now all files should be playable
* -vc mpeg12 resizes the window when aspect ratio changes
* Smacker audio and video decoding via lavc
* Windows Media VC1 video decoder via binary DLL
* Flash Screen video decoder via lavc

Demuxers:
* simultaneous audio capture/playback (-tv immediatemode=0) fixed in v4l2
* PVR support
* AAC ADTS demuxer
* libdvdread updated to v0.9.4
* support for some more MythTV NUV files
* modularization of demuxer code
* MPEG in GXF container support with extension-based detection
* faster MPEG and much faster GXF demuxing
* more user-friendly demuxer forcing
* MPEG Layer 1 and 2 demuxing fixed
* properly pass Vorbis extradata from Matroska container
* DVR format support
* H.264 ES high profile support
* TV channel cycling
* DVD subtitle and audio stream mappings fixed
* fixed RealAudio demuxing, now all files should have correct A/V sync
* partial support for QuickTime sound atom version 2
* improved handling of text subs in Matroska files
* DVD subtitles disabled by default
* support sipr codec in old RealAudio files
* fixed framerate detection of interlaced H.264 in raw/PS/TS streams
* support for variable framerate Ogg/OGM files
* made demux_ogg.c work with ffvorbis decoder
* fixed playback of RealVideo in Matroska files on PPC
* added support for Vorbis in MOV/MP4

Streaming:
* fix streaming of RealAudio files over HTTP
* show SHOUT/Icecast metadata while playing
* ultravox (unsv://) streaming support
* stream code ported to new modular API, massive code cleanup
* bandwidth selection for Real RTSP streams (for faster stream dumps)

FFmpeg/libavcodec:
* Snow bug fixes and speedup on x86, x86-64 and AltiVec
* MPEG-1/2/4 and H.264 decoder speedup
* Indeo2 (RT21) video decoder
* Fraps video decoder (v0 & v1, v2 not yet supported)
* Vorbis audio decoder
* RV20 fixes
* VP3 decoder fixes and speedup
* countless bug fixes all over the place
* vstrict=-1 is default, Snow, ffv1 etc. need vstrict=-2
* skiploopfilter/skipidct/skipframe decoder options for very fast H.264 decoding
* D-Cinema audio demuxer and decoder support
* Duck/On2 TrueMotion2 (TM20) decoder
* FLX and DTA extensions for flic
* QDM2 audio decoder
* cook audio decoder
* TrueSpeech audio decoder
* WMA2 audio decoder fixed, now all files should play correctly
* JPEG-LS decoder (unfinished)
* CamStudio video decoder
* Theora decoder
* improved MOV and QuickTime demuxer
* improved AVI muxer
* multithreaded decoding
* bitexact decoding
* DV50 encoder, decoder, muxer and demuxer
* true audio (TTA) decoder
* AIFF/AIFF-C audio format, encoding and decoding
* Creative VOC demuxing
* Zip Motion-Block Video (ZMBV) decoder
* KMVC decoder
* NuppelVideo/MythTV demuxer and RTJpeg decoder
* MP4 and MOV demuxer greatly improved to support all varieties of currently available files
* AVS demuxer and video decoder
* American Laser Games multimedia (*.mm) playback system
* Smacker demuxer and decoder
* Flash screen Video decoder
* Trellis-optimized ADPCM audio encoder
* Major improvements to Snow quality and encoding

GUI:
* skins now reside in a directory named 'skins', not 'Skin'
* ported to GTK2
* long standing upside down vpotmeter bug fixed
* don't hang on unreadable skin files
* random fixes and improvements

Filters:
* much faster version of spp filter (-vf fspp), and pp7 ("fast spp=6")
* remove_logo filter
* lavcresample now used by default (-af-adv force=0 gives old behavior)
* vf_expand and vf_dsize now support aspect and round parameters
* screenshot filter
* -af pan command line fix, now outputs the right number of channels and accepts values < 0 or > 1. Channel order had to be changed.
* -af sinesuppress to remove a sine at a certain frequency
* negative stride support in swscale
* big-endian and AltiVec fixes and performance improvements for swscaler, color conversions and post-processing
* -srate fixed
* hqdn3d: 2.5x faster temporal-only, 1.6x faster spatial-only
* new proof-of-concept karaoke (voice removal) filter
* motion compensating deinterlacer (-vf mcdeint)
* Yet Another DeInterlacing Filter (-vf yadif)

MEncoder:
* audio encoding modularized
* AAC (FAAC) audio encoding
* border processing adaptive quantization in libavcodec
* encoding zones, DivX profiles support, luminance masking, multi-threaded encoding for XviD
* raw audio muxer
* fixed various bugs in the EDL code
* x264 "turbo mode" to speed up first pass of multi-pass encoding
* x264 custom quantization matrices
* -delay allows real audio delay instead of just a delay in the header
* search for (deprecated!) frameno.avi is now disabled by default (use -frameno-file frameno.avi to enable)
* -o is now mandatory. You can add 'o=test.avi' in ~/.mplayer/mencoder to get the old behavior back.
* In multiple file encoding, either all or no files must have audio. Use -nosound to force.
* support for VBR MP2 encoding in toolame
* twolame support
* libavformat muxers support
* VBR audio in MPEG support
* muxer_mpeg: added an experimental film2pal teleciner and fixed previous bugs that could lead to desync and to wrong TFF/RFF flags being set
* rewritten muxer_mpeg.c: buffering and timing constraints will always be respected, provided that the muxrate is big enough

Ports:
* improved timer function on Mac OS X
* New Mac OS X "macosx" video output driver. Supported on OS X 10.4 and 10.3 with QuickTime 7 (requires QuickTime 7 SDK to build on 10.3)
* Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) fixes
* macosx audio output driver fixes
* preliminary support for Intel Macs
* support for playing DVDs copied to harddisk on Cygwin
* DragonFly BSD support
* liba52 ASM optimizations ported to AMD64
* configure check and compiler optimizations for VIA C3, C3-2 and Pentium-M
* configure check and compiler optimizations for AMD-64 extended
* configure can now run with cross compiling, new configure option --enable-cross-compile
* -(no)border option to get a bordered/borderless window on Windows
* Experimental AIX support
* AltiVec support fixes
* POWER5 support
* OpenGL output ported to Windows
* FreeBSD default DVD device added
* MIPS64 support
* Darwin portability fixes
* improved Debian packaging
* improved Win32 multi-monitor support
* Sun's mediaLib disabled by default on Solaris (broken and non-optimal)
* VP6 and WMVA binary codecs should now work also under FreeBSD 6

Others:
* Audio/Video synchronisation fixes
* enabled hinting for TrueType fonts
* support for file:// syntax
* -fb option removed, use the device suboption of -vo fbdev/fbdev2 instead
* full gcc 4 support
* TOOLS/vobshift.py: vobsub time-adjust tool
* TOOLS/psnr-video.sh: computes PSNR between two existing video files
* fixed auto-insertion of lavc encoder (for DXR2/3 and DVB)
* new option: -idle, to make MPlayer wait for input commands when done playing all files
* lots of new slave commands (check DOCS/tech/slave.txt)
* lots of new information provided by the -identify option
* fixed ugly looking OSD with -vo gl2 and MMX
* support for OSD localization
* -rawaudio/-rawvideo requires -demuxer rawaudio/-demuxer rawvideo
* libdvdcss updated to 1.2.9
* ~/.dvdcss is used instead of ~/.mplayer/DVDKeys for cached CSS keys
* libcdio support for CD playback
* new option -msglevel to directly control the verbosity of MPlayer modules
* -verbose option removed, use -v or "-msglevel all" instead
* -edl is now per-file in MPlayer
* new input command prefixes, "pausing_keep" and "pausing_toggle" which alter pausing state immediately after command
* environment variable MPLAYER_VERBOSE controls verbosity before the command line is parsed
* environment variable MPLAYER_HOME controls location where configuration files are searched for
* memleak fixes all over the code
* TOOLS/aconvert: allows MEncoder to encode from an audio-only file
* TOOLS/3*m_convert: D-Cinema audio and video conversion program
* TOOLS/qepdvcd.sh: anything supported to VCD/SVCD PAL/NTSC
* TOOLS/encode2mpeglight: MPEG format encoding tool using only MEncoder
* allow multiple -help clauses on the command line
* console "OSD" for audio-only files
* show total time when playing audio-only files
* support for .wpl playlists
* support for ncurses as termcap library provider
* parallel make fixed
* (improved) support for shared libav* libraries
* playback/encoding profiles support
* new property API
* new -monitorpixelaspect option to determine monitor aspect from screen resolution

There has been a Slackware package for this in LinuxPackages and i used that package and it worked. After installing, i tried to play some movies file and yes, it worked (usually MPlayer asked for many packages to be updated, but luckily for this release, it didn't ask for any other packages). If you like to watch movies in GNU/Linux, you should try this application.

Upgraded to 2.6.17 Successfully

After some time of answering the questions being displayed and compiling the kernel itself, finally my working kernel 2.6.17 is installed. As i tought in my previous post, the new kernel will bring some changes, both internally and externally, so you will have to look for information about the new release before you start upgrading before you break some of the functionality of your system. One of them is KernelNewbies. It provides great resources and tutorials for kernel developers newbie and also people who are interested in Kernel development (or just to see human readable changelog, rather than looking at the kernel's changelog directly which a bit of complicated for ordinary people like me).

The .config file being used is quite different since the kernel itself has changed, so there are some options being removed and added in this release, so you will likely gets a lot of questions when you tried to compile your kernel using your old .config file like i experienced. The kernel image that being produced is also larger than the previous kernel version. You can see the difference in the screenshots below. You can also see my .config file as reference. It's a working .config file for Slackware-current, so if you are using Slackware-current, you can try to use this file.

Linux Kernel 2.6.17

Finally, the final version of Linux kernel 2.6.17 is out and available for public. This kernel version (code name "Crazed Snow-Weasel") has been queued for a long time (Linus released six Release Candidate version before the final version). As usual, the final version of a new kernel will bring some changes in configuration and may break things in your system, so please have a look on the changelog first before you start upgrading your kernel. If you would like to read a human readable changelog, i suggest you visit KernelNewbies.

Kernel 2.6.16.x is one of the big jump and now, the story continues to 2.6.17. It's time to download, compile, and upgrade my Slackware system. One note for those that uses WiFi feature based on Centrino chipsets, you should upgrade your firmware to 3.0 version which can be downloaded from IPW2200 project. I believe there should be many changes should be made if you want to use this kernel version, so read the changelog carefully and make a good planning on it.

Accessibility Problem

Today, i read in DetikInet that Roberto Perez de Paz from Cuba receive his software engineering degree even though he is fully blind. This is a wonderfull example for encouraging people, since many people will have difficulties to work if they can't see anything, but Roberto has managed to encounter those problems and he has got his degree. Luckily, there are some company that tries to solve this problems by making a research and developing products which can be used by sight-impaired (or fully blind) people to continue their work by using their tool, for example, Text-To-Speech module, braille reader, and also screen magnifier.

One of those product is Supernova, made by Dolphin Oceanic Ltd. This application consists of magnification, speech & Braille reader for Windows platform. They have worked very hard with Microsoft to produce this application and make it compatible with Windows (that's the sad news. No Linux version up to now). It was nice application and i have tried this application, since it is being used by my project (OWG project). Although it wasn't the best application (since it cannot recognize all of the components being used in my project, but for overall usage, this application is adequate enough). One more thing that i kindda dislike from this application is the resources being used is so high. Your computer will be slower than before when you start the application, but when you close it, it will be faster again.

FYI, my project that i'm working up to now is called OWG Project (Onderwijs WerkGroep - Education Work Group). OWG project is a desktop-based educational application that was built to help visual and hearing impaired childrens to learn using computers as their tools. It consists of eleven modules which are categorized for learning alphabets, words, typing, basic arithmetic such as decimal numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in a fun and friendly environment. It has a text-to-speech and also highlighting features to provide both visual and audio feedback to the students. There are two parts of this module, which is teacher and students part. Teacher will be able to set up time limit, number of exercises, type of exercises and settings to fit each pupils' conditions. This is a great project, but up to now, it's only available in Dutch language (since OWG is based in Netherlands). English version and/or web-based version will be likely be available in the next edition.

Reduce Spammers

In the last several months, my personal website was hit by spammers everyday (in guestbook section). It's because the hosting services disabled the GD library and it will be enabled again if we upgraded the basic package to professional package. I used GD to make small (and simple) CAPTCHA code to prevent bots to fulfill my guestbook. Since then, i make a simple validation based on blacklisted IPs, but it wasn't effective as well, since they can use open proxies and they can do IP Spoofing using tools that are available on the Internet.

Last month, my account on the hosting services was expired and then we changed to my friend's hosting service and i asked him about the GD status and he said that it is enabled, so yesterday, i re-upload the code to enable CAPTCHA code in my guestbook to reduce spammers. I know somehow, they can broke it, but at least, it has been drastically reduced for now and i'm pleased with that, since i made the code by myself (with some help of PHP Manuals). I know that there is a PEAR extension for CAPCTHA, but i don't know whether the PEAR is installed or not, so for safety, i just create some simple code but it worked (at least for my case). I will also find better code with simpler technology to be implemented soon.

Next step is to implement the same code in my writings where visitors can give their comments on my articles that i wrote.

Picasa Web Albums

After Eko sees my post about Google Browser Sync, now it's my turn to see his post about Picasa Web Albums. I have signed up yesterday and this morning, i received an email about the service. I just need to open a browser and open the link that they have given to me and i can start using Picasa Web Albums. If you have Picasa, then you can upload your photos using this application. It's well integrated with the Picasa (i don't know if it works also with Linux version of Picasa, but i think it should be also, since the Linux version is basically the same version as the Windows version, but runs on Wine). If you don't have Picasa, then you can start uploading your photos manually, just like Flickr.

The interface being used is very user friendly and i like it. You don't need too much complicated settings just to upload or publish your photos to public. This is what Google has done in most of their application. They addopt KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach and this is what i like, as more complex interface will make the application slower and consumes more memory/resources.

I have uploaded some of my pictures and it can be accessed via this url : http://lh2.google.com/willysr.

Dozens of Updates

Microsoft Corporation has just released a dozens of updates on their regular monthly security updates. Eight of them are considered critical, while the rest three updates are important and one patch is considered moderate. This month's update include two patches for Microsoft Office products, Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office PowerPoint, one patch for Windows Media Player, and two patches for Internet Explorer. You can get them on the Security Bulletin page. Please note that support for Windows 98 has been dropped and there isn't any patches for Windows 98. They just provide some workarounds to solve problems that arose in Windows 98.

They also have launched a new Microsoft Update service which gives better solution than Windows Update few months ago. What i don't like on this service is that they recommend to turn on the Automatic Updates features to download them automatically. I don't like this approach, since it will be slower, since i usually use download manager to download them. I usually pick the third options (Notify me, but don't automatically download and install them). This way, i can search for the packages in Microsoft's site and download them. Another reason is that i need the patch also for my laptop, so i have to download them separately in order to install it in my private laptop.

CSS3 On The Road

W3C is now working on CSS3 and they have separate the specification into several modules. Most of them are still in working draft, but some browsers have started to give partial support for it. There will be a lot of improvements in CSS3 compared to CSS 2.1. Hopefully every browser will support CSS3 in the future and they will have a similar implementation of CSS, so let's just hope that in the future, there will not be any text saying "this site is best viewed with". Up to now, the best support for CSS comes from browsers other than IE, and i think it will be that way for some time until the release of IE 7, which fixes some of the bugs in positioniseverything.

WebStandards has urged that every vendor should collaborate to create a single view of the CSS specification, but as you know, some vendors thinks they are smarter than others and then they implement other thing besides what has been specified by W3C. One of the efforts given by WebStandards are by making Acid2Test, a simple test to check whether the browser being used by the viewer has support all the features in CSS Specification. Not every browser has passed this test. As far as i know, only Opera 9.0 (beta), Safari, and Konqueror that have passed this test. If they passed the test, this picture should be displayed perfectly.

Google Browser Sync

Another Google product and this time, it has to do with Firefox, the open source browser which recently became one of the recommended browser by some organizations, because it has a better security measurements among the other browser (i must admit that Firefox is not the perfect product, since it still contains 4 unfixed bugs and 1 partial fixes, based on Secunia). It also has slower startup time compared to Opera, but still i like Firefox, as it can be extended by using extensions.

One of the latest product from Google also comes in form of Extension, called Google Browser Sync. This extension can syncronize your browser settings, thus you will have the same settings on all of your computers (you may need to install the extension on the second computer as well). It can be used for another purpose, which is backup. It uses Google accounts to identify the users, but it's fairly common for people to have Google accounts, mostly from GMail invitations. Nice apps and this can be usefull when you are travelling in other city or country. Just hope that they had Firefox in their laptop in install the extension, and all of your information will be available from Google's server.

Good, But Not Good Enough

I watched a world cup match between Netherlands and Serbia Monte-Negro and the match was very attractive, compared to England vs Paraguay. Both team show a high speed match and even some individual skills (mostly are Arjen Robben). As far as i seen, the Dutch seems to depends too much on Arjen Robben to break up the defense line. The ball supply mostly goes to the left side, rather than to the right side, even in that position, they have van Persie which is good enough to do the task. Ruud van Nistelrooy also didn't do his job too good on this match. It wasn't his best performance tonight and being replaced as the result.

That's the good news. The bad news was that the presenter for the match wasn't good enough to be a presenter for this big game such as World Cup. Some people have complained and wrote it in their blog, such as Priyadi. Other people were complaining about the opening ceremonial which wasn't broadcasted by SCTV that have the license on that. The news was written in Kompas also. SCTV said that the license was different and it would cost so much as it costs about 1 Billion rupiahs. I think they can pay that money just from the commercial advertisements during the World Cup events which held for about 1 month. Well... business is business, but they couldn't ignore customer's desire to watch the opening ceremonial of World Cup 2006. I hope they broadcast the closing of the World Cup and don't the same mistake twice.

First Experience

Today i went to Ambasador Mall in Jakarta and it was my first visit to this mall. The mall itself wasn't so big and it wasn't too luxurious also. My mother and sister wanted to buy a new CDMA mobile phones there, so we went to ITC Kuningan, which was next to Ambasador (there is a bridge that connects this two buildings). Even though the building was not so big and luxury, i appreciate the management that consider security is a big matter by giving a map in each lift doors. The map describes where are the emergency stairs, as it would be dangerous to use a lift when there are problems. Unfortunately i don't have any digital camera, so i couldn't post it here.

Partial Migration

Few months ago Mandriva has started to test the SVN version for their projects, including the i18n project. When i tried to update the Indonesian translation, i couldn't do a commit on DrakX file since it's locked. I asked Pablo, coordinator for i18n project and he only said that the file was changed. I have known about this changes, but still i couldn't find it on the CVS site. Later on, i ask Thierry Vignaud, another cooker developer who works on the i18n project also and i found out that the DrakX and initscripts file has been migrated to SVN, while the others still using CVS. It's quite strange, since it's only a partial migration. Why would they use two kind of control system for a single purpose?

The other bad news is that my username wasn't listed in the new svn account, so i couldn't checkout a new module. I have sent an email about this to Thierry and let's wait for his answer.

Back Online

After for two days without Internet, since the main server in my office crashed, finally i can come back online again. The server crashed because of the mainboard and the replacement which should have come yesterday didn't come up to now, so since yesterday, we started to configure a new server and finally we made it back online today. Living two days without Internet was so pain. Let's just hope the server will be available for a long time :D

No Pain No Gain

Last night, after i went back from the office, i turned on my laptop and i wanted to start updating my laptop, but suddenly, i got a freezed system after dhcp client couldn't find any DHCP Server (I once plugged this laptop at my office's network and it remembers the DHCP setting, and i didn't know how to erase this at first). It must because of the updated hotplug which patches net.agent in the last update of Slackware-current. I tried once again and it still failed. So i tried to boot using another kernel, 2.4.31 (this is one of the reason why i still keep my 2.4.x kernel, for rescue and emergency situation where i couldn't boot into my 2.6.x kernel). I want to downgrade to the previous hotplug package, but it seems that i have erased it yesterday (silly me, removing a critical package without conducting a testing first. Luckily it's only my personal laptop, not a production server, or i'll be in a big trouble). So i tried to look at /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and i couldn't find something that i'm looking for, so i continued my search to /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf. Here i see a line USE_DHCP[0]="yes". So this is the troublemaker. I tried to remove the yes value and let it be blank. After that, i tried to upgrade to the latest udev, 0.92, created by Piter Punk and i started to reboot my system to do some testing (i won't repeat my mistake twice).

When i reboot, the system works well, except before starting xinetd service, it displays an error in /etc/rc.d/rc.M line 70 which couldn't find the directory /dev/.udev/failed/class@input.... (i couldn't remember it well). I guess this was an udev problem, so i switched to the previous package, udev-0.90 and reboot again. This time, it works well and i started to upgrade all the packages, including KDE and MySQL. I had to recompile the PHP in order to detect the new MySQL Client Library, since i linked it using the --with-mysql and --with-mysql-sock parameter, so that it would use the MySQL Client Library bundled with MySQL rather than using the bundled package in PHP which was rather obsolete and can't be used to connect to MySQL 4.1.x and above. I also found a problem in Apache since i couldn't browse to http://laptop.slackie.org, which was a local hostname for my localhost. Later on, i found that i made a virtual host which points to unavailable directory, so it won't find the page and i forgot to remove it. Now it has been fixed and i can browse to the main page.

After struggling for about 30 minutes of fixing problems and upgrading packages, finally i can enjoy the latest KDE. You can see my new KDE along with KOffice and kernel information at Konsole. In the release notes, the KDE team has stated that they have reordered the KDE startup to reduce boot time. I noticed a slight improvement on my system, but it's not a radical changes. Usually, KDE desktop will be shown after all the items in the Splash Screen are finished and splash screen have dissappear, but in the new KDE, desktop will be shown before the splash screen dissappear. It reminds me of Windows behaviour which does this sometimes, mostly if you are connected to a network and Windows are loading your profiles.

At first, i got a lot of problems, but after suffering for about thirty minutes, finally i deserved that i should got, a new shinny system with the latest kernel and packages from Slackware-current. No Pain, No Gain.

Informatix Is Back

Finally, the DNS record has been switched to the new name server and Informatix is now back to online, but unfortunately, i don't bring the backup for Informatix today, so i just put an index page for that. My website has come back online again, since i have a backup on my office laptop, so i can upload it as soon as possible. Local OOo Documentation project page has also been restored and they are online also. Too bad, we lost our forum and screenshots for Linux's desktop that we made when we are still learning GNU/Linux for the first time.

I hope i can make the main page came back online tommorrow as tonight i will upgrade my Slackware system with the latest update from Slackware-current changelog. There has been an official KDE 3.5.3 packages on the -current tree, so i'm going to upgrade it tonight. I downloaded a total of 390 MB tonight just to get the updates for Slackware. Luckily i can finish it all tonight and let's have a nice upgrade to KDE 3.5.3. Last night i also compile the latest kernel 2.6.16.19 and it worked well.

Knoppix 5.0.1

Knoppix, the famous LiveCD GNU/Linux distro has come to their first 5.x version when Knopper has released Knoppix 5.0.1 in 2 of June 2006. The preview of this wonderfull distro was published in CeBIT 2006, but now it has been updated with new kernel and also udev hotplug managements. Here are the new things among Knoppix 5.0.1:

* Linux Kernel 2.6.17 (rc)
* Debian (testing/unstable)
* Xorg Version 7.0
* Detection of onboard IDE-Raid Controllers and raid disk components
* udev+hwsetup for automatic hardware detection
* KDE 3.5.2, GNOME 2.12 from Debian/unstable
* OpenOffice 2.0.2 (german+english)
* transparent write access for NTFS partitions (libntfs+fuse)
* new knoppix-installer now also with the possibility to update existing installations of Knoppix

You can start downloading Knoppix in public mirror.

Meanwhile many people prefer Ubuntu, i still prefer Knoppix for LiveCD distro, as it came with KDE and GNOME both in 1 CD (perhaps because it uses DVD rather than CD), eventhough i never used GNOME. If you want to use KDE for your Window Manager in Ubuntu, try Kubuntu. They are all derived from the same distro, Debian Linux

Informatix is Down

For some technical problem, Informatix.or.id was down (and so does my website) and we are planning to migrate the hosting to Revti. Right now, we have requested CitraWeb to change the DNS to point to Revti's NameServer. I hope this won't take so much time and my website site can back to operational again, and so does for Indonesian OOo Documentation project which was hosted there either. Luckily, i have made a mirror on Jogja Linux User Group's website.

Education Ethic

Today i went to a well known university in Jakarta to accompany my cousin for his final project. I was quite confused with the mentor, since this is a one person project, but he said that it would need more than people to do that and the worst thing is that he said that you can use any program, including programs in the Internet, as long as you can explain it well to the tester of your final project. They don't want to give a **** care about how the process was done. They only wanted to know the final results. Is this how education ethic was implemented here? I was kindda surprised, since it's a well known university in Jakarta. The building was nice and clean, but the human resources?

Other thing is that they wrote down the password and URL for internal system, (one with the root password, even though i'm not sure that they use GNU/Linux for their systems. Maybe an admin password). That kind of information was not supposed to be written in a whiteboard where people who came there can see. Those information should be kept carefully, unless you want your system to be messed up by other people.

The conclusion is that we should never judge everything from the outer part. We should look also the inner part of thing that we want to judge, since we may never know what lurks inside.

Massive Updates

Today there are a lot of updates just like few days ago. Mozilla has released an update for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 which should be released in 1.5.0.3, but there was one critical patch that should be sent to consumer so they postponed this updates and planned to release it in 1.5.0.4. You can see what has been fixed in Firefox and Thunderbird.

Slackware-current has also upgraded some of their packages, including the latest kernel package which was released few days ago (trying to catch bleeding-edge of the kernel i think, since it's only 1 patch from the previous 2.6.16.18 version). I'm still waiting for kernel 2.6.17 which soon will come out and bring a lot of updates to the GNU/Linux systems.

Java has also being updated to 1.5.0_07. There is a lot of time gap between this release and the previous 1.5.0_06. You can see what has been changed in their Release Notes.

Another big release is KDE which has just released another updates, KDE 3.5.3. Taken from KDE's website :

Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Stability and speed were also improved, along with increasingly complete translations in 65 languages.

Significant enhancements include:

* KDE startup sequence reordered to improve startup time.
* Over 800 minor issues fixed thanks to Coverity, as part of a project initiated with funding from the United States Government.
* Small new features were implemented in Akregator, KMail and KAlarm. This release alters the tradition of limiting "maintenance releases" to bug fixes. "Feature freeze" was relaxed somewhat to accommodate qualitative improvements held back by the long release cycle of stable 3.5.x series.

let's wait for the next updates in Slackware-current. It will be a huge updates :D

Start Using OpenDocument

The new OpenDocument format (ODF) has been approved for ISO/IEC 26300 in early this month. The intention of bringing this new format is to provide an alternative format for office application which mainly uses proprietary format, such as Microsoft Office. This format has been adopted by many OpenSource office application, such as OpenOffice.org and KOffice.

This standard was developed by the OASIS industry consortium, based upon the XML-based file format originally created by OpenOffice.org. Next, a new alliance, called OpenDocument Format Alliance was build to educate policymakers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of the OpenDocument Format, to help ensure that government information, records and documents are accessible across platforms and applications, even as technologies change today and in the future.

What is the benefit of using OpenDocument format? You are vendor independent, as many vendor can look at the specification of the format (unlike MS Office's undocumented format) and they can build an application which can manipulate file that uses OpenDocument format. For example, if you are using KOffice right now, in the future, you won't have problems when you want to change to OpenOffice.org, since both of this application have gave their supports on OpenDocument format and their default format is OpenDocument Format (since OpenOffice.org 2.x and KOffice 1.5.x). There will be an unified format for all future office suite and this will give many benefits for everybody, as they can choose whatever office suite they like, as long as it supports OpenDocument format.

So, what's next after the format has been approved? Of course publications and socializations, as many organizations still relies on proprietary format. There will pro and cons about this, but some countries has started to migrate to OpenDocument, for example in France and in some states in US, like Massachussets.

So, when will Indonesia follow this? Indonesia has an IGOS project, but in my personal opinion, it's not well maintained and supported by the governments. It only try to feature GNU/Linux as an alternative operating system, but not OpenDocument as an alternative office format. Independent format is one of the critical component to consider when someone or a company is starting to migrate to Open Source, since they need office application as their daily business routines.

You can contribute by creating as many documents as possible using OpenDocument format or publishing an article about OpenDocument format in your webpages, blogs, or any other media.